The present invention generally relates to inventory control and configuration management and more specifically to techniques for using a schema to describe metadata for inventory control and software configuration management tasks.
Software configuration management (SCM) is traditionally understood as an activity that relates to provisioning software components (i.e., programs, applications) onto appropriate operational environments (such as a particular operating system situated on a particular hardware component) and to setting attributes (e.g., parameters) to ensure proper functioning of the software components in the environments. There are many different ways to express attributes for provisioning various software components and to specify how to set the attributes. Each product may express its own attributes differently, which causes great difficulties in uniformly addressing software configuration management for combinations of products.
Inventory management (IM) is traditionally understood as maintaining a life cycle of components, which includes such tasks as knowing what is available for provisioning, what is being provisioned, and where it is provisioned. In addition to component life cycle management, IM also includes the maintenance of hardware, for example which hardware items (network cards, hard drives, CPUs, memory, etc.) are available, how they are assembled into blocks or blades, how they are connected network-wise, etc. IM typically includes its own way of expressing attributes for the provisioned software/hardware.
Accordingly, software configuration management and IM tasks do not deal with common metadata. For example, different products use different metadata for performing software configuration management and inventory management tasks. Accordingly, it is difficult to address SCM and IM tasks despite the fact that they have overlapping domains.